No, as recent successes show. But “winning” will take many years, and cannot be achieved by force alone

IF YOU rub your eyes, take a deep breath and look with an open mind at the numbers, the conclusion is unmistakable: things are going a lot better in Iraq. From Afghanistan, too, comes the occasional report of a significant success. This week, for example, American and British soldiers helped Afghan government troops wrest the symbolically important town of Musa Qala back from the Taliban. Is it possible that after four and six years respectively, the American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are at last beginning to come good?

Our reports this week from the front-lines of both wars (see article and article) suggest that the answer to that question should be a guarded yes. In Iraq General David Petraeus's “surge” and a Sunni backlash against al-Qaeda have sharply reduced the killing. It is true that more than 20 civilians are still killed on an average day, but it was not uncommon a year ago to find as many as 100 corpses at dawn. In Afghanistan the yes is more tentative. Violence is spreading and suicide-bombings, less frequent now in Iraq, are taking a rising toll. But as the winter snow begins to fall, American and NATO forces have reached the end of the fighting season without suffering the big reverses they feared at its beginning. As Gordon Brown, Britain's prime minister, boasted this week, it is NATO that took the offensive this year. And in some parts of the country, such as the region around Khost, more Afghans seem ready to transfer their allegiance from the Taliban to the elected government.

It is important, however, to understand what “coming good” means. It does not mean that victory is near. The hope (once shared, we admit, by this newspaper) that the West's armies could return swiftly home and leave good order behind them was naive. Saddam Hussein and the Taliban ran cruel dictatorships. But in uprooting them the West exposed deep tribal and sectarian schisms, unleashing violent forces that the dictators had kept in check and which could not be reconciled simply by installing democratic procedures. Although Afghans and Iraqis voted eagerly for democratic constitutions and new governments, these governments are not working well. The losers have not accepted defeat; meanwhile, the winners, especially in Iraq, have been determined to take all.

In such circumstances, “victory” for the West is not going in either place to entail a surrender ceremony and a parade. At best, coming good will consist of a tapering off of violence, and a crab-wise movement towards a political accommodation between the governments elected under Western supervision and the militias now fighting them. At worst, of course, the West can be defeated. Even if America and its allies prevail in every battle, public opinion may tire of the fight and bring the boys home. Spain, Australia and others have already given up on Iraq. Even the faithful British are now pulling out—albeit under cover of the half-truth that their job in the south is done.

Of these two wars Iraq is the harder to sell. Unlike the Taliban, Saddam Hussein was not an ally of al-Qaeda or complicit in the attacks on America. Those weapons of mass destruction still don't exist. The war in Iraq has taken a much greater toll of American lives—some 4,000, compared with about 500 in Afghanistan. All the same, conditions now are far better than in September, when General Petraeus travelled to Washington to explain the merits of his surge to a sceptical Congress. It is not only the Iraqi civilian death toll but also the American military one that has fallen sharply since then—so much so that the war is beginning to fade as the hottest issue in America's election.

It could get worse, and probably will

In war, however, a pause is seldom an end, and the Shia-dominated government of Nuri al-Maliki has not used the lull to cut a deal with the Sunnis. The consequences of wasting this precious opportunity are predictable. The Sunnis who have been armed by General Petraeus to fight their former allies in al-Qaeda will turn once again on the Shias if they conclude that no acceptable terms for sharing power (and oil) are available. Shia death squads will go back to work, ethnic murders will soar again and Americans will resume calls to extract their soldiers from a maelstrom they cannot contain.

As in Iraq, so in Afghanistan: it would be both morally wrong and tactically foolish for the West's politicians to exaggerate temporary gains in the vain hope of stilling the domestic clamour for withdrawal. Voters are not fools, and most already know what the politicians sometimes fear to tell them. “Victory” in George Bush's wars will at most mean preventing catastrophe; and even this modest aim will for years require spending Western lives and money in campaigns that will demand as much attention to the once-reviled business of nation-building as to the use of military force. Fortunately, Western armies are slowly learning how this can be done.

As to whether either war is worth the prolonged struggle, that is a question whose answer must depend on the changing costs and benefits. A humiliation in Iraq would batter American prestige and unsettle allies who have staked their security on American power. It would embolden al-Qaeda; but might also extinguish a fire that has drawn new jihadists to the cause. At present, however, the strongest case for America to stay is its duty to prevent an even worse calamity from befalling Iraq's people. That calculation could change, too: at some point the American presence may stoke up more violence than it damps down. But for now the judgment of this newspaper remains that an American withdrawal is more likely to end political bargaining and provoke a free-for-all.

In Afghanistan, the moral and political calculus is plainer. Defeat would be a body blow not only to the Afghans themselves, so recently liberated from the medieval cruelties of the Taliban, but also to the NATO alliance and to international law, under which it had full authority to wage this war of self-defence. Too many NATO members in Europe have nonetheless been reluctant to send enough men and machines. That should surely change. Democracies need the courage to withdraw from wars that bring no good, but also to persevere in just ones—even when the end is not yet in sight.